So, umm, don’t bind spaces to a button on your Logitech mouse.
UPDATE: It seems like you can actually interact with the spaces and applications to some limited extent. Dragging applications between spaces works.
UPDATE 2: You can also interact with the applications via the KEYBOARD in between the moment when you select a space and the moment when it finishes the zoom in animation! Immediately after selecting a space, hitting command+Q will CLOSE THE APPLICATION!!
After first starting to use a Mac, I instantly noticed that something felt fishy with the mouse. Every now and then it would feel like I was dragging the mouse through mud to get it to move. I would pick up the mouse, look at the bottom (habit from using an old ball mouse from years ago), set it back down and shake it vigorously.
Of course what I was experiencing was just a feature of OSX. Mouse Acceleration. Coming from Windows XP and Gnome, I was used to having the mouse move at a linear rate. Moving the mouse one inch on the mouse pad meant that it would move exactly X number of pixels across the screen. I always try to configure my mouse settings such that I can move the cursor across the screen with a single sweep across the mouse pad. I HATE having to lift up my mouse, move it, and set it back down on the opposite side of the pad. I think my want to have efficient mouse movement stems from my gaming background, where speed and accuracy is key. Yes, I might just be a twitch gaming n00b.
OSX doesn’t use a linear conversion between the distance moved by the mouse and distance the cursor moves on the screen. OSX also takes into account the speed at which the mouse is being moved. So if the mouse is being moved fast, then the cursor will fly across the screen much quicker. But if the mouse is being moved slowly, OSX will slow the cursor down to a crawl. This seems like a good idea, especially if you’re a designer working with graphics that often require small precise movements of the cursor.
Now I’m not using a Mac laptop, and I assume that in the case of a touch pad the mouse acceleration thing is MUCH easier to get used to. But for me using a regular mouse with a Mac Mini means that I am CONSTANTLY picking up the mouse and readjusting it to get the cursor across the screen. On a touch pad, lifting your finger up and readjusting is easy.
Something like this that feels so wrong when you first try it, you would think could be turned off via a setting. Unfortunately that’s not the case. There is no way to turn off mouse acceleration in OSX without third party software. Now I have nothing against third party software, plugins, addons, extensions or anything like that. Just look at World of Warcraft, Firefox or Eclipse to see how you can make good software even better by installing additional features. But I think there is a difference between just improving something via addons, and actually changing something that feels broken. Mouse acceleration feels broken to me, or at least the fact that you cannot turn it off feels broken. Adding a patch, or addon that was written by a third party doesn’t seem right to me. It feels like a hack that you apply until the next patch or update comes out.
So the fix that I’ve applied to my mouse acceleration problem was using a program called SteerMouse. SteerMouse was very easy to setup and solves the issue of being able to turn off mouse acceleration. Unfortunately it costs $20 after your 15 day trial period is up. I would pay the 20 bucks, but I really don’t feel like spending money on something that feels like a kludge.
